Dear Reader,

I’m excited to announce that next month, The Daily Line will open a bureau in Springfield to publish a new newsletter, the Springfield Daily Line, focusing on state government news. Our bureau will be led full-time by experienced state government reporter Rae Hodge, who just completed a Fulbright Scholarship studying journalism at Cardiff University. Before heading over the pond, Rae worked for the Associated Press and then operated her own news service in the Frankfort, Kentucky statehouse.

Everyone knows the amount of Illinois statehouse news coverage has declined precipitously. Our plan for the Springfield Daily Line is to produce new reporting from new angles currently uncovered. We’re going to produce something completely different from any existing publication, creating a must-have report for our paying subscribers–just as we have in Chicago.

Exactly what do we plan to cover? We will focus on stories that most impact those who depend on government for their business success. That means, like in Chicago, we will provide fine-grained detail on legislation and policies moving through the General Assembly, publish as many bill briefings and primary documents as we can get our hands on, and include more coverage of state boards like JCAR and the ICC than you’ll find elsewhere. Our plan is unearth detail uninteresting to the regular citizen, but critical to those who know how can government turn on the little things.

Rae and I have aggressive plans for growth in Springfield. By no means do we intend for her to be the only person on our team. We’ll be adding additional reporters as our subscriber base grows, with an eye towards increasing our daily coverage of government policy-making. If our experience in Chicago is a good indication, and with talent like Rae leading our team, our coverage is going to get better and more interesting very quickly.

When we launched our full-time Chicago coverage in March 2015, we signed on enough subscribers to ensure a full-year’s operations within a month. Help us beat that goal as we prepare for our Monday, July 17 Springfield launch. We’re not planning to offer Springfield monthly subscriptions during 2017, so sign up now for a full year’s subscription and receive a 10% discount.

Subscribe Today

Got news? We’re taking your state news-related press releases at [email protected]. Send it there and our Springfield news team will get them.

You can also follow @TheDailyLineIL on Twitter and on Facebook.

As always, please drop me a line if you have any questions!

Mike Fourcher
Publisher